British biologist and documentary filmmaker Tom Mustill almost died in 2015 when a gigantic humpback rose above the kayak from which he was watching whales. A shocking video, with the whale’s final turn as it fell to avoid killing it, went viral. Mustill had endless questions. One sounded strong: What would happen if humans and animals could talk to each other? The result is How to Talk Whale (Taurus), a book that explores the possibility of establishing real contact with animals thanks to the advances made by artificial intelligence and how it would change the way we see them. Her book is part of a renewed editorial interest in the animal world, from its dreams (When Animals Dream, Errata Naturae, by University of San Francisco philosopher David Peña-Guzmán) to its rights (Justice for Animals, by Martha Nussbaum, in Paidós), their coexistence: George (Errata naturae), the stories of care and loss of Frieda Hughes, daughter of Sylvia Plath, with magpies, crows and owls, and even her rebellion (Animal Insurrection, by Sarat Colling).
In Mustill’s case, he wanted to understand. And he discovered a new world. “I was able to find out much more about the whale that jumped on me, who he was, who his mother was, where he was born, how old he was, what whales he spends his time with, through AI, which can recognize patterns of the whale’s body. whale in the images. I learned about my whale who was seven years old. And last year scientists in Mexico identified it again from a ship thanks to these AI tools. They are very powerful to understand nature and connect with it, listen to it.” If when Cousteau recorded videos they talked about the silent ocean, he says, now we have the many sounds of it.
After the success of AI with human languages, today it is applied to animal language with large projects such as CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative). “Today you can distinguish the differences between individual whales, between their voices, their different populations, their dialects, sometimes with great differences such as between Catalan and Basque. Dolphins that hunt in collaboration with fishermen in Brazil have different voices than those that don’t. When you compare the differences in their voices, you see differences in their behaviors. Different cultures. “Whales teach each other different ways to behave,” he notes, just as not all of humanity is Chinese. An AI that has served to know that “sperm whales have patterns in their clicks, vowels and consonants, a phonetic alphabet”, but also that 20% of humpback whales have disappeared due to hunger due to global warming,
“Can we ever understand them? They have been talking in the sea for millions of years. It could be that AI shows that they have a language and we have a hard time understanding what it means to a whale. At the same time, they have many challenges similar to ours. Have babies to feed with milk. Breathe. Talk and teach things to each other. Build relationships and learn to trust. Maybe they are understandable,” she reasons. And tell that there are surprising facts that change your understanding of them and us. Like the baby whale whose birth was recorded by the CETI. “She was surrounded by her mother, sister, brother, grandmother, and even other species, dolphins arrived, all communicating. At birth they lifted her onto her back and helped her breathe. You could hear the different whales talking, the different individuals with their personalities and relationships with this baby. And they heard the baby speak on his own for the first time, learning to use his voice. And now they can follow it throughout their lives. Maybe listening to this baby whale can teach us how to speak sperm whale and the first subtitled animal film.”
“Whales – he concludes – have a very intense social life. They do things for fun. An orca started wearing a salmon as a hat. And all the females in her group imitated her, like a TikTok craze. Dolphins have names that they learn as babies. Some dolphins, ten years after separating, shouted their names and played. Maybe the whole world is full of individuals where we only see a kangaroo or a whale. And AI is helping us find out.”
Animals that, adds philosopher David Peña-Guzmán, in addition to speaking, dream. His interest in the animal mind, in the difference between living beings and beings that feel, in the position of animals in our culture and our homes, led him to his dreams and from there to politics and ethics. “Animals have an inconsistent position in our society, there are many similarities between a dog and a pig, but the treatment is very different. “It is arbitrary which animals we love, eat or use in laboratories,” he says, “and the act of dreaming implies a type of consciousness, of sensitivity, that most of us recognize as very important from a moral and legal point of view. Since one knows that an animal dreams, one can conclude that it has the kind of sensory, perhaps even cognitive, experience that requires us to make a legal and moral change in our view of animals.”
And, he says, evidence indicates that many animals dream. “Neuroscientific experiments show patterns of brain activity in sleep associated with very specific behaviors that have functional value in the life of that animal. Seeing an animal of the same species, an enemy, neuronal patterns linked to the act of singing or eating. And in your dreams there are physiological signals of feeling activation. With certain dreams, blood pressure rises. They are having a dream that means something to them, with an emotional side. This act requires mental faculties that we had not thought about in non-human beings. Because the act of dreaming typically has to do with past experiences that we have lived: animals have the ability to remember their past, they carry events from what already happened and have the power to activate them in the present. A second capacity is imagination, because dreams are never literal renditions of the past. And there is the emotion, there is always a sentimental side in the dream. Memory, emotion and imagination are the bridge that takes us from the act of dreaming to a change in the way we see animals that has to do with the law, with morality, with ethics.”
The problem, he says, is that Western philosophy has been a fetishist of reason, defined as abstract thought, calculation and language. “A very rigid conception of reason that has been put on a pedestal. This has caused many dimensions of experience and existence, even human, to fall to the side. That is why emotion has been denigrated, the body, put in an inferior position to the mind, and that has translated into a misogynistic system of thought, with women associated with the body and emotion, and non-Europeans since the Greeks are He has considered them as individuals without reason. Now the paradigm of how we think about animal life is changing, but we are very far from the type of practical change that is reflected in the discourse,” he concludes.
